How Emotions are Made: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s Constructed Emotion Theory

How Emotions are Made

Lisa Feldman Barrett’s book, “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain,” shares her model of constructed emotions, which is the product of her research and practice as both a psychologist and neuroscientist.

Her constructed emotions model challenges the historically held view (based on some research that has suffered from the replication crisis) that human emotions are inate, hard wired and universal across our species. Instead, she says that our emotions are constructed by our brains and that we learn which emotions to construct in relation to different expected stimuli based in part on our culture and past experiences.

Constructed

A commonly held historic view of emotions is that they are an inate part of being human. In other words, we don’t learn them, they are just there in our very human nature. This view says that emotions are universal across the human race, that people from all species will experience the same emotions if they encounter the same situation. It also says that we recognise the emotions that people are feeling based in their facial expressions, regardless of their social, cultural and geographical background. NB – some of the research that led to this view has suffered from the replication crisis.

Feldman Barrett has challenged this view. She says that our emotions are not inate. Instead, they are learned. We aren’t born with them, instead we learn what emotions we should experience in the different contexts we find ourselves in. This learning is heavily influenced by our past experiences and by our social and cultural contexts which can influence the concepts we have learned which give meaning to the different bodily experiences we give emotional names to. Under this model it is clear that emotions are not universal. Instead, different individuals may clearly experience different emotions in response to the same situation and stimuli.

Predictive

Feldman Barrett’s model incorporates the predictive engine theory of the human brain. Essentially, what this says is that our brains are prediction engines that are constantly predicting everything that is about to / is actually happening and serving this up to our consciousness as reality. In other words, what we experience in our lives as reality is really our best predictions as to what is happening, not a genuine representation of the external world being captured through our sensory organs.

Feldman Barrett’s theory of emotions says that the emotions we experience arrise as a response to our predictions about the world, not as a response to the actual external stimuli that we experience. This obviously adds a further layer to their construction as we construct not only our understanding of what emotions should be, but also our predictions of the world.

Our brains are plastic

Feldman Barrett also calls out that our brains are not fixed. Our neuro-plasticity (which we seam to learn more about all the time) means our brains are able to change over time.

What this means is that the way we predict the whole world can change over time and the different emotions that we construct in response to each of our predicted world states can change over time too. Some of the changes to which emotions we generate in response to a predicted world state are the result of changes to our conceptural frameworks about the world.

A key implication of this plasticity view is that we can change how we emotionally respond to the world around us.

There’s a load of great additional reading you could do in relation to this topic including some more articles we’ve written:

• Perhaps looking at some of the domains of Emotional Intelligence is helpful, as is exploring Amygdala Hijacking moments.
• We also think that self-talk,  meta-emotion and meta-cognition are interesting and helpful concepts when thinking about our emotions.
• The idea of career narratives and personal values might also be interesting, as they may shape how we construct our emotions and predict our futures.
• As ever, beware of the replication crisis.

Of course, there are loads of great things to read elsewhere on the internet too. You might also enjoy an oldish podcast we recorded on emotional intelligence:

This all feels fairly sensible and intuitive to us and we like it.

It seems reasonably to assume that we are all, at least in part, a blank slate / tabula rasa. And if this is the case, it seems sensible that our emotions could be one of the things we learn to construct as opposed to being born with. Clearly this is just our speculaton based on our own experiences and observations.

The aspect we find perhaps most interesting in reltion to all of this is the plasticity of it all. It’s the fact that these things can change. Not only can our emotional responses to different predicted situations change, but our prediction engines can change as well. In our view, many of the tools and methods that are being used to help people navigate their lives and careers (e.g. personal values, CBT, ACT and so on) are mechanisms to try and change some of this prediction engine and emotional construction.

Other interventions including the (re)emergent use of psychodelics as well as things like mindfulness practices seem to also be trying to change these neuro-mechanisms.

Clearly, much more work is being done in this space from a thereputic and chance perspective that we know about, and it is an exciting time to be observing these developments.

Barrett, L. F. (2017). “How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain“. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

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